The Life, Times And Legacy Of Malcolm X - The Real El-Hajj Malik Shabazz

07 February 2011

By Zainab Cheema

In the month marking the 46th anniversary of Malcolm
X's shahadah (real name El-Hajj Malik Shabazz), the
task of tabulating his political legacy is a rather
delicate enterprise. In US cinematic culture, he is
perhaps known best from Spike Lee's 1992 film,
recently selected for the National Film Registry.
(Even as the Academy Awards continue to shun Spike,
it's nice that the Library of Congress finally
recognized his magnus opus as a great film).

I used to teach the Lee film to US students, as a way
of re-introducing them to streams of experience and
resistance that have been shunted off from US public
consciousness. For, it is a fact undeniable that in
the mainstream American narrative, Malcolm X has been
sidelined in favor of Martin Luther King, whose own
life has been frozen in time at the 1964 March on
Washington and "I Have a Dream" speech. (MLK's clips
about racial harmony in the US are endlessly replayed,
but his later stands on US accountability to the
African American underclass and war-stricken
Vietnamese get deleted).

Since Malcolm X, through the evolution of his thought,
believed in calling a spade a spade — or as he said,
"truth is truth" — he is still blacklisted in US
memory-making as an angry racist. "The angriest black
man in America" as the press called him at the time, a
view which has crystallized into a fact he mourned in
the seminal Autobiography of Malcolm X, his life's
account narrated to and published by the writer Alex
Haley. On his return from Hajj, he fearlessly made
the break between the Nation of Islam spokesman and
the new man by declaring that he was now thinking for
himself, where as before he spoke on behalf of Elijah
Muhammad. "I had enough of someone else's propaganda,"
he wrote to his friends from Makkah, "I'm for truth,
no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who
it is for or against."

In an age of half-truths and omnipotent shadows of
grey, to commit to a maxim like "truth is truth"
exhibited political and intellectual courage. Malcolm
X was one of the 20th century's most fearless public
thinkers — someone who thought out loud, his insights
interconnected with masses of people like the
intangible warp of neurons. He explains his commitment
to truth in the Autobiography and proves it in the
course of his life — moving from atheistic hustler and
equal opportunity crook, to black nationalist, to
postcolonial activist, and then to radiantly
self-conscious Muslim, in the course of his 39 years.
"My whole life has been a chronology of… changes," he
tells Haley.

It was perhaps this intransigent commitment to truth
as he found it, that cost him his life (besides
Allah's (saw) decrees for life and death, of course).
On his return to the United States, he found that his
support base could not mentally move as fast as hew
was, that the leap from the raw black nationalist to
tempered Muslim was too rapid for them. He relates his
frustration to Haley: "They won't let me turn the
corner!" He once privately exclaimed to the writer,
"I'm caught in a trap!" Under the stormclouds of FBI
and Nation of Islam hostility, he took to the Harlem
streets with a new set of ideas in his speeches: "True
Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious,
political, economic, psychological, and racial
ingredients… to make the Human Family and the Human
Society complete." But it would take the African
American community another decade or so (under W. Deen
Muhammad and others) to make this transition.

In Alex Haley's moving epilogue to the Autobiography,
recording the writer's personal accounts of Malcolm X,
we see the toll that it took on him, the utter mental
and bodily exhaustion at having to combat fire bomb
attacks on his house, hostile black factions, state
repression, and a slow-moving support base. In the
final trek to the Audoban Ballroom where he is shot,
Haley records how the "usual lithe strides" have
turned to a heavy trudge, the toll exacted by the
burdens of globally communicating his message, jump
starting a new organization from ground zero,
reforming his public image, and supporting his family.

And then there is the moving vignette of him
apologizing to his assistant after he vocalized his
frustration at the cancellation of speakers to his
Audoban event. After she tells him that she
understands: "[in a] voice sound[ing] far away, ‘I
wonder if anybody really understands — '"he says,
before walking out to the podium under the ghostly
portent of gunshots. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is
as much about the relationship between Haley and
Malcolm X, the personalization of the man's power of
communication to an interlocutor (which thanks to
Haley's talents, is set up to be as much the reader as
Haley himself). "[H]e was the most electric
personality I have ever met," says Haley, and the
Autobiography makes you feel that way too.

I have called Malcolm X one of the most fearless
public thinkers of the 20th century. Let us
illustrate. One of Malcolm X's signature abilities was
to look at the interconnections between phenomena,
rather than looking at issues, people, and interests
in isolation. Even after the Nation of Islam leader,
Elijah Muhammad, jealous of the brilliant young
activist he had taken under his wing, threw him to the
dogs — isolating and banishing him from the Nation
after a faux pas — Malcolm X refrained from
criticizing Elijah, noting that the white power
structure had blacks fighting blacks for too long. It
was only after Elijah Muhammad evicted his family from
their home that the figurative gloves came off
regarding the former's sexual pecadillos and other
transgressions. Even with the Nation of Islam's
hostile treatment of him, he demonstrated fidelity to
his passionately advocated principle of black unity at
enormous personal cost.

Similarly, as he grew into the Northern ghettos'
foremost social reformer and activist, he intuitively
affiliated with the struggle of Asian and African
nations throwing off colonial yoke. Resisting the
regionalism and parochialism demonstrated by a number
of his civil rights colleagues, Malcolm X ratified
political and moral brotherhood with his international
counterparts in Ghana, Senegal, Egypt, and China among
other places. He understood that justice is a global
project.

And it is no exaggeration to say that he was a
formidable spoke in the US plans to maneuver these
newly independent countries in its orbit by
energetically representing US domestic cruelties
toward African Americans. As he queried: "How can
white American government figure on selling
‘democracy' and ‘brotherhood' to non-white peoples —
if they read and hear every day what's going on right
here in America and see the
better-than-a-thousand-words photographs of the
American white man denying ‘democracy' and
‘brotherhood' even to America's native born
non-whites?"

He also deconstructed the good cop-bad cop segregation
of American politics as manifested in the Democratic
and Republican parties, which have crystallized the
hapless voting patterns of African Americans and
Muslim Americans. "Yes, I will pull off that liberal's
halo that he spends such efforts cultivating!" he
declared, critiquing the desperation, drugs and
prostitution in the urban ghettos even as the North's
liberals criticized the Southern conservative's
lynchings.

And while Martin Luther King's position was that the
culture of hatred toward African Americans from the
late 19th to 20th centuries was a moral lapse that
America's better nature could overcome, Malcolm X
demonstrated a more intellectual grasp of the
political landscape. He realized that there is a
systemic link between race and power in the US and
Europe, which necessarily produced an "other", a
sub-human, a slave that was to be despised, feared,
and exploited; a fact Muslim Americans are discovering
anew in the post-9/11 United States.

Many of us have significant experiences that somehow
remain segregated from our mental life, neatly
segregating our emotional and our mental blueprints
for living. But it is a testament to the wholeness of
Malcolm X's thought process, which was liberated by
his journey to Makkah, that he understood whiteness to
be social construct, a power position, rather than a
fact etched in the biological stone, as it were.

After his amazement at the experience of brotherhood
brought about by Hajj, he realized that "it isn't the
American white man who is a racist, but it's the
American political, economic, and social atmosphere
that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in
the white man." It has taken 50 years of African
American academic scholarship, from Henry Gates Louis
Jr., Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman and others, to
adequately theorize this insight.

Malcolm X's early rhetoric against the "white devil"
is a product of Nation of Islam reverse-racism, as
well as his own deeply wounding experiences with
economic, sexual, and mental exploitation by whites
extracting their pleasures and profit from the ghetto.
But his ability to infer universal principles from his
experiences enabled him to see the back end of racism,
and to begin purging it from his intellectual make-up,
all within a year of his "divorce" from the Nation of
Islam. "America needs to understand Islam, because
this is the one religion that erases from its society
the race problem," he said. "In my thirty-nine years
on this earth, the Holy City of Mecca had been the
first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All
and felt like a complete human being," he said.

I've felt that for many Muslim Americans, the
homage to Malcolm X derived from a tinge of cultural
chauvinism — the preference for somebody famous
choosing something we are affiliated with. (The rush
of gratification at the rumors of Michael Jackson or
anybody else "big" converting to Islam, for example).
And the final, greatest chapter of the Autobiography
where he witnesses and affirms the brotherhood of man
under One God often gets interpreted under the
"multiculturalism" that often translates into the
desperation of Muslim American elites to get accepted
into the power culture.

However, Malcolm X reserved his most cutting sarcasm
for such elites, who were quite visible during the
civil rights movement, and who often traded away the
rights of the "socially disinherited" for their social
access. "A desegregated cup of coffee, a theatre,
public toilets — the whole range of hypocritical
‘integration' — these are not atonement," he declared.
The ethics of brotherhood and spirit didn't wipe out
the onus of resistance — till the end, he was
ceaselessly mobilizing against the violence directed
toward black bodies and black lives. An energetic
example for Muslim American leaders who plead
integration and organize publicity campaigns of
Muslims as multicultural, peace loving citizens in the
face of pre-emptive prosecutions, draconian community
surveillance, secret evidence, show-trial circuses,
and so on.

Malcolm X's legacy is an underground one — a global
network of hearts and minds that persists even though
the official memory-makers excise him from the civil
rights narrative. Among my students, the most
appreciative ones were often the young second
generation immigrants — whether Vietnamese, Indian, or
African — who saw in his life the lesson that
divine-given human dignity is a social right to be
struggled for. It is no surprise that Malcolm X finds
his natural audience among the disenfranchised, the
oppressed — a moveable audience that in the post-9/11
era has come to center on the global community of
Muslims. We are his memory-makers, whose mettle is
tested by our ability to give tribute to his mind and
spirit.

Many have regretted his early death, regretting the
heights he could have reached through the sheer power
of thought and transformation that he exhibited in his
life. "It's a time for martyrs now," he relates in his
Autobiography, "And if I'm to be one, it will be in
the cause of brotherhood." On the crossroads of the
divine and the temporal on which he acted, as do all
who believe that "truth is truth," his victory is the
victory of those who struggle for justice. But his
tragedy is the tragedy of those who are ahead of their
people, the tragedy of all leaders born before their
time